Why I’m a detective
Detective dreams
When I was younger I used to daydream about being a detective. The lone sleuth piecing together the puzzle from the clues she’s unearthed, solving crimes and closing cases, slinking off to sniff out the next story. I’ve always been curious about all manner of things, and been able to be interested in things others might find mundane. I guess that’s partly how I wound up being a journalist, delighting in the questioning and questioning it took to get to the bottom of a story, or to find the jewel of information in among all the dead ends. It’s probably how I found myself in my first editorial position as staff writer for Collect It magazine. I know my friends wondered how I could be so excited to spend hours talking to people about their ceramic pomander collections, or shelves full of flattened cereal boxes dating back to the 19th Century. But for the time that I spent with those people telling me about the most important things in their lives, for those minutes what was important to them became just important to me.
And so I guess it’s no surprise to me that I have created myself another career within the detective industry. For that’s what my work (and I use that term loosely) is like for me when I’m with a client. For that time that we are together, I am investigating all the information my client gives to me consciously or unconsciously, following threads and looking for clues that might lead to the wheres and the whys of their issues, unravelling their story to get to the bottom of what it is that’s causing the problem, searching for the evidence that their unconscious is using to perpetuate the condition, then piecing it all back together to find the clue that will lead to the ultimate goal: happiness.
Just a happy thought that came to me today as I was helping an inspirational client towards finding the solution herself to a question that’s been puzzling her for her whole life. Being a psychological detective is a fun job!